One of the key assets an enterprise has is the data it captures about its customers and their interactions with these customers. Data regarding a particular customer and his/her interactions/relationships are typically created by various enterprises using software applications that provide a solution for a single business function, product line or touch point, the data being stored in a plurality of disparate and independent data sources. This results in applications and data sources that are managed independently and do not share data well with one another. Also, the applications and data sources often have different data models and means of tracking and reporting customer interactions, leaving enterprises with islands of difficult-to-reconcile relationship data. As such, data regarding a customer is strewn across multiple applications and data sources in different lines of business or product divisions. Due to this data dispersion, it is difficult for an enterprise to obtain a comprehensive view of a customer and his/her interactions with the various enterprises.
The lack of a comprehensive view of customers drives a variety of business problems. Marketing, sales, finance, call-center, and service agents lack a complete understanding or overview of the customer's interactions to other enterprises. As such, opportunities to drive new revenues or increase profitability are lost, for example, when new potential customers or opportunities are not linked and identified. Opportunities are also lost when cross-sell and up-sell recommendations are based on generic offers or inaccurate or incomplete data about an individual customer. Operational, compliance, and credit risk increases as organizations lack a comprehensive understanding of customer relationships.
Conventionally, enterprises have been unable to properly leverage available customer data stored in multiple data source locations and can only obtain a fragmented view of a customer and the customer's relationships with various enterprises. As such, there is a need for a method for leveraging all of the available customer data to create and maintain a unified and comprehensive view of a customer across multiple disparate data sources. More generally, there is a need in the art for a better way of capturing, maintaining, and viewing relationship data that expresses relationship between various entities associated with an enterprise.